Bikini Atoll

• Oppenheimer had many achievements in theoretical physics but is remembered as the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
• But he conveyed a sense of anguish – scripting his own tragic role, as I argue in my book about him.
• “The physicists have known sin,” he remarked two years after the attacks, “and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

‘Batter my heart’

• As physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said, the bomb “treated humans as matter,” nothing more.
• But Oppenheimer pointedly used religious language when talking about the project, as if to underscore the weight of its significance.
• The atomic bomb was first tested in the early morning of July 16, 1945, in the arid basin of southern New Mexico.
• Mathematician John von Neumann acerbically observed, “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”

Describing the indescribable

• On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, these cities suddenly ceased to be.
• Robert J. Lifton, an expert on the psychology of war, violence and trauma, called the Hiroshima survivors’ experience “death in life,” an encounter with the indescribable.
• When it comes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, he chooses to represent the attack without portraying it.

The bomb to end all wars?

• After the end of the war, many of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project sought to emphasize that the atomic bomb was not just another weapon.
• Among them, Oppenheimer carried the most authority as a result of his leadership of Los Alamos and his oratorical gifts.
• The form it ultimately took, known as the Baruch Plan, was rejected by the Soviet Union.
• Rather than seeing the bomb as the weapon to end all wars, the U.S. military seemed to treat it as its trump card.
• The era of mutual assured destruction, when a nuclear attack would be certain to annihilate both superpowers, had begun.